Tom Waits

“Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.”

“Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it.”

“Somebody said I sound like an old lady, and I was really insulted by that. I'm trying to sound like Skip James and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye.”

“Any image I have, it's just what I do, but it comes off as being very pretentious. When you're a bit in the public astigmatism, anything you do seems like you did it so somebody would see you do it, like showing up at the right parties.”

“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.”

“There ain't no devil, only God when he's drunk.”

“My first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.”

“Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.”

“If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.”

“It's hard to win when you always lose.”

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”

“Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.”

“I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.”

“I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that.”

“You know when you throw a party, you think people will show up and no one will like each other. It's like that with music - parts of your musical psyche have never met other parts. You wonder if you should get them together.”

“If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back, it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.”

“You hope people are going to be listening to you after you're gone. And they like you better after you're gone.”

“The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable.”

“The sight of the first woman in the minimal two-piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the U.S. at Bikini Island in the Marshall Isles, hence the naming of the bikini.”

“There's not much difference between what I appear to be on stage and what I am. I think people like that, that I'm not trying to pull a caper.”